As a result of its commitment to make mobile browsing as green as possible, Opera Software, which runs various data centres to process the vast amount of data serviced to Opera Mini and Opera Turbo users around the world, has been able to maintain a sustained average power usage effectiveness (PUE) of around 1.5. This is down significantly from its previous PUE estimates of 2.2 in 2009 and 1.9 in 2010.
Opera plans to reduce the figure even further and its data centers use renewable energy sources as much as possible. For example, Opera has data centers in Iceland where 100% of the energy is considered renewable. In addition, it requires its data centers in the US to be powered by 80% renewable energy (or provide proof that the utility company will increase the percentage to 80% within the next three to five years).
The company’s average usage of renewable energy was 65% in 2011, up from 63% in 2010 and 45% in 2009. In the next two years, Opera hopes to increase that to 80% as it phases out the older and less efficient data centers and moves toward greener ones.
